Graphics have been a blind spot for me for pretty much my entire career. I more or less failed upward into where I am now (which ended up being a lot of data and distributed stuff). I do enjoy doing what I do and I think I'm reasonably good at it so it's hardly a "bad" thing, but I (like I think a lot of people here) got into programming because I wanted to make games.
Outside of playing with OpenGL as a teenager to make a planet orbit around a sun, a bad space invaders clone in Flash where you shoot a bird pooping on you, a really crappy Breakout clone with Racket, and the occasional experiments with Vulkan and Metal, I never really have fulfilled the dream of being the next John Carmack or Tim Sweeney.
Every time I try and learn Vulkan I end up getting confused and annoyed about how much code I need to write and give up. I suspect it's because I don't really understand the fundamentals well enough, and as a result jumping into Vulkan I end up metaphorically "drinking from a firehose". I certainly hope this doesn't happen, but if I manage to become unemployed again maybe that could be a good excuse to finally buckle down and try and learn this.
I concur; just last month I started with `wgpu` (the Rust bindings for WebGPU) after exclusively using OpenGL (since 2000, I think? via Delphi 2). Feels a bit verbose at first (with all the pipelines/bindings setup), but once you have your first working example, it's smooth sailing from there. I kind of liked (discontinued) `glium`, but this is better.
Yeah you're not the first one to mention that to me. I'll probably try WebGPU or wgpu next time I decide to learn graphics. I'd probably have more fun with it than Vulkan.
I feel the same. I was trying to make some "art" with shaders.
I was inspired by Zbrush and Maya, but I don't think I can learn what is necessary to build even a small clone of these gigantic pieces of software, unless I work with this on a day to day basis.
The performance of Zbrush is so insane... it is mesmerizing. I don't think I can go deep into this while treading university.
> Every time I try and learn Vulkan I end up getting confused and annoyed about how much code I need to write and give up.
Vulkan isn't meant for beginners. It's a lot more verbose even if you know the fundamentals. Modern OpenGL would be good enough. If you have to use Vulkan, maybe use one of the libraries built on top of it (I use SDL3 for example). You still have freedom doing whatever you want with shaders and leave most of resource management to those libraries.
I have a hot take. Modern computer graphics is very complicated, and it's best to build up fundamentals rather than diving off the deep end into Vulkan, which is really geared at engine professionals who want to shave every last microsecond off their frame-times. Vulkan and D3D12 are great, they provide very fine-grained host-device synchronisation mechanisms that can be used to their maximum by seasoned engine programmers. At the same time a newbie can easily get bogged down by the sheer verbosity, and don't even get me started on how annoying the initial setup boilerplate is, which can be extremely daunting for someone just starting out.
GPUs expose a completely different programming memory model, and the issue I would say is conflating computer graphics with GPU programming. The two are obviously related, don't get me wrong, but they can and do diverge quite significantly at times. This is more true recently with the push towards GPGPU, where GPUs now combine several different coprocessors beyond just the shader cores, and can be programmed with something like a dozen different APIs.
I would instead suggest:
1) Implement a CPU rasteriser, with just two stages: a primitive assembler, and a rasteriser.
2) Implement a CPU ray tracer.
These can be extended in many, many ways that will keep you sufficiently occupied trying to maximise performance and features. In fact to even achieve some basic correctness will require quite a degree of complexity: the primitive assembler will of course need frustum- and back-face culling (and these will mean re-triangulating some primitives). The rasteriser will need z-buffering. The ray-tracer will need lighting, shadow, and camera intersection algorithms for different primitives, accounting for floating-point divergence; spheres, planes, and triangles can all be individually optimised.
Try adding various anti-aliasing algorithms to the rasteriser. Add shading; begin with flat, then extend to per-vertex to per-fragment. Try adding a tessellator where the level of detail is controlled by camera distance. Add in early discard instead of the usual z-buffering.
To the basic Whitted CPU ray tracer, add BRDFs; add microfacet theory, add subsurface scattering, caustics, photon mapping/light transport, and work towards a general global illumination implementation. Add denoising algorithms. And of course, implement and use acceleration data structures for faster intersection lookups; there are many.
Working on all of these will frankly give you a more detailed and intimate understanding of how GPUs work and why they have been developed a certain way, rather than programming with something like Vulkan, spending time filling in struct after struct.
After this, feel free to explore any one of the two more 'basic' graphics APIs: OpenGL 4.6, or D3D11. shadertoy.com and shaderacademy.com are great resources to understand fragment shaders. There are again several widespread shader languages, though most of industry uses HLSL. GLSL can be simpler, but HLSL is definitely more flexible.
At this point, explore more complicated scenarios: deferred rendering, pre- and post-processing for things like ambient occlusion, mirrors, temporal anti-aliasing, render-to-texture for lighting and shadows, etc. This is video-game focused; you could go another direction by exploring 2D UIs, text rendering, compositing, and more.
As for why I recommend starting with CPUs, only to end up back with GPUs again, and one may ask: 'hey, who uses CPUs any more for graphics?' Let me answer: WARP[1] and LLVMpipe[2] are both production-quality software rasterisers; frequently loaded during remote desktop sessions. In fact 'rasteriser' is an understatement: they expose full-fledged software implementations of D3D10/11 and OpenGL/Vulkan devices respectively. And naturally, most film renderers still run on the CPU, due to their improved floating-point precision; films can't really get away with the ephemeral smudging of video games. Also, CPU cores are quite cheap nowadays, so it's not unusual to see a render farm of a million+ cores chewing away at a complex Pixar or Dreamworks frame.
Vulkan isn't a graphics API, it's a low level GPU API. Graphics just happens to be one of the functions that GPUs can handle. That can help understand why Vulkan is the way it is.
Outside of playing with OpenGL as a teenager to make a planet orbit around a sun, a bad space invaders clone in Flash where you shoot a bird pooping on you, a really crappy Breakout clone with Racket, and the occasional experiments with Vulkan and Metal, I never really have fulfilled the dream of being the next John Carmack or Tim Sweeney.
Every time I try and learn Vulkan I end up getting confused and annoyed about how much code I need to write and give up. I suspect it's because I don't really understand the fundamentals well enough, and as a result jumping into Vulkan I end up metaphorically "drinking from a firehose". I certainly hope this doesn't happen, but if I manage to become unemployed again maybe that could be a good excuse to finally buckle down and try and learn this.